Email Is Faster Than Fax

We all know that email is faster than fax, but you might not notice how much faster until there are thousands of faxes to send. I saw a case in point when one book wholesaler that orders books from my company converted its purchase orders from fax to email this month. Its old system had the overnight crew send thousands of faxes (well, a thousand, anyway) every Wednesday and Thursday night, taking about 12 hours — and that’s not counting the faxes that had to be sent a second time, after the end of the queue, because the machine jammed and pages were dropped. The new system sends the same volume of purchase orders by email. This takes the email server, I estimate based on my company’s position in the alphabet, about 7 minutes. The speed-up is roughly a factor of 100.